Who owns the infrastructure?

To Bob Frankston’s way of thinking this all comes down to who owns the infrastructure. […] The Internet has been a huge success to date specifically because nobody much controls the electrons. This is as opposed to services like broadcasting where some perceived scarcity of spectrum allowed governments to determine who could give or sell us entertainment and information. The ISPs (by which I mean telcos and cable companies) would very much like to go back to that sort of system, where they, not you, are the provider and determinant of what bits are good bits and what bits are bad.

Frankston points out that we build and finance public infrastructure in a public way using public funds with the goal of benefiting economic, social, and cultural development in our communities. So why not do the same with the Internet, which is an information infrastructure? […]

The obvious answer is for regular folks like you and me to own our own last mile Internet connection. […] The idea is simple: run Fiber To The Home (FTTH) and pay for it as a community of customers — a cooperative. The cost per fiber drop, according to Bill’s estimate, is $1,000-$1,500 if 40 percent of homes participate. Using the higher $1,500 figure, the cost to finance the system over 10 years at today’s prime rate would be $17.42 per month.

„It’s honest funding,“ says Frankston. „The current system is like buying drinks so you can watch the strippers. It is corrupt and opaque. We should pay for our wires in our communities just like we pay for the wires in our homes.“

There would be a community-financed Internet revolution and this time, because it would be locally funded and managed, very little money would be stolen. Dark fibers would be lighting up all over America, telco capital costs would plummet, and a truly competitive market for Internet services would emerge.

[…] Worse, by trying to force us within their service model we lose the opportunity to create new value and can only choose among the services that fill their coffers […]

Instead of having the strange phenomenon of carriers spending billions and then arguing that they deserve to be paid, we’d have them bidding on contracts to install and/or maintain connectivity to a marketplace that is buying capacity and making it available so value can be created without having to be captured within the network and thus taken out of the economy.